I’m not the only one with no luck handling hardware. Even Gentoo developers don’t like working with hardware.

Oh, how the hardware hates me. My poor Gentoo development box and primary desktop workstation has been suffering a long string of random lockups lately.[…]

Today I cleaned out the machine, getting rid of a fair amount of dust. I had to remove the graphics card to get at its cooling fins, and ever since reinstalling it and rebooting, there are minor graphical glitches covering the screen at bootup, at least until the initrd is loaded. Everything’s fine once fbsplash and X kick in. Maybe I shoulda wiped off the PCIe contacts or something?

Though Josh Saddler seems to be having the opposite problem. His video clears up when graphics load but mine got worse after the splash image loaded.